Good points. I figure there's no shortage of headphone amps in the world (although Outlaw's pricing would be nice). But then I think a lot of people would use this imaginary headphone amp in bed or in a comfy chair that isn't necessarily next to where their rack of gear is. You don't want another rack of source components just to play a CD for headphone listening (well, I do but can't afford it). And, you don't want to be using that cheap portable player either. So why not include a transport+DAC. It wouldn't make it that much bigger. Still small enough to put where you're comfortable. Most portable equipment has cheap DACs...

Probably most new-techy types, then, are going to want to listen to the gigabytes of digital files that they're toting around on their laptops. Laptops don't have great DACs but they are more convenient that carrying around 50 CD's So, since the imaginary unit has a DAC, let it accept input via USB from a laptop. Add another digital input for a traditional source and this would round out the units flexibility and usefulness. Obviously I didn't include analog in's for platter types. Optional in my book.